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  • 🧠 Turing Institute funding crunch | đŸ± AI cat soap operas go viral | đŸȘ™ ETH nears $236M liquidation risk

🧠 Turing Institute funding crunch | đŸ± AI cat soap operas go viral | đŸȘ™ ETH nears $236M liquidation risk

You get a national AI lab colliding with politics, the internet’s strangest AI trend, and the ETH level that could trigger cascading liquidations.

Author

Sascha Thiele
August 18, 2025

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🖋 Today’s Angle

  • Ever seen a world‑class AI lab pivot to defence and watch its scientists revolt? Wait until you hear what’s happening at the UK’s Turing Institute.

  • A new genre of AI‑generated cat videos is taking over social feeds, and it’s not just cuteness—it’s melodrama, violence and Billie Eilish.

  • Your transcription service might be eavesdropping on your voice to train its AI. One startup just got slapped with a lawsuit.

  • ETH traders are sweating a potential cascade of long liquidations if prices fall below $4,170.

  • Thailand’s “Tourist Wallet” promises cashless convenience, but its crypto conversion feature is still on hold.

––Sascha Thiele

🚀 Tech & Business

What Happened: The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national AI lab, is in turmoil. A whistleblower complaint alleges that staff fear the institute could collapse if ministers pull ÂŁ100 million of funding. Government officials want to pivot the institute’s focus toward defence and security, a move some researchers say undermines its mission. Up to 10 % of staff have been warned they may be made redundant, and projects on online safety, housing and health inequality are being axed.

What Happened: A bizarre new genre of AI‑generated cat videos is dominating social media. Soundtracked by Billie Eilish’s melancholic hit What Was I Made For?, these 30‑second clips feature anthropomorphic felines in melodramatic scenarios—cheating on lovers, losing limbs at work, fighting sharks and surviving house fires. Millions have viewed these lurid tales, which often end with violent twists. In one clip, a muscular cat saves a drowning baby and moves them into a Beverly Hills mansion.

What Happened: A class‑action lawsuit claims transcription service Otter.ai records every participant in a meeting—even those without an Otter account—to train its speech‑recognition AI. The complaint alleges Otter doesn’t get consent from guests and shifts the responsibility to its paying users. The plaintiffs say this violates the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act and various California laws.

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💰 The Finance Overview

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The start of the week finds investors cautiously optimistic. Big tech stocks ride the wave of expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut rates at its September meeting, with Wall Street hovering near record highs. Asian markets set the tone: Tokyo’s Nikkei jumped 0.77% to another record, Shanghai gained nearly 0.7% and Shenzhen 1.38%, while India’s Nifty 50 rose 1.2%. European and U.S. futures are up, though a high‑stakes Washington meeting between Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders keeps traders on edge. Brent crude sits around $66 per barrel and gold at $3,348 an ounce.

Big Tech Barometer: With rate‑cut hopes, FAANG shares are buoyant. The prospect of cheaper borrowing could support further innovation in AI and cloud services.
Startup Thermometer: HoneyCoin, a stablecoin‑powered payments platform, just raised $4.9 million from Visa Ventures, TLcom Capital and the Stellar Development Foundation, aiming to scale a liquidity engine that settles transactions instantly instead of waiting 4–7 days. Processing over $150 million monthly for 350 enterprises, the startup plans to hire more staff and expand its product suite.
Infrastructure Watch: Taiwan’s Foxconn has quietly become an AI‑server powerhouse. Revenue from AI servers and cloud networking surpassed its iPhone assembly business in the second quarter. Consumer electronics now represent 35% of its revenue versus 41% from cloud and networking. The company—Nvidia’s biggest server maker—expects AI server revenue to grow more than 170% in Q3, reflecting a broader shift across Taiwan’s tech industry as firms like Quanta and Wistron also pour resources into data‑center gear. Taiwan now accounts for about 80% of global server shipments and over 90% of AI servers.
Wild Card: UK housing enters its usual summer lull; prices slipped 1.3% in August amid more homes on the market, giving buyers leverage. Oil and gold markets respond to geopolitical meetings, while investors watch Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s upcoming speech at Jackson Hole for clues on future monetary policy.

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What Happened: Ether traders are nervously eyeing the $4,200 level. Data from HyperDash shows that 56,638 long positions—worth $236 million—could be liquidated if ETH drops to $4,170. Additional liquidation clusters sit at $3,940 and $2,150. Mechanism Capital founder Andrew Kang warns that cascading liquidations could drag the price to $3,200–$3,600.

What Happened: Bangkok’s government has launched the Tourist Wallet, an e‑money app for foreign visitors to pay by QR code. Travellers can top up via cash, cards or bank transfers, and spending caps are set at 500,000 baht ($13,800) per month for merchants and 50,000 baht for small shops. A highly publicized crypto conversion feature, however, remains in a regulatory “sandbox” until mid‑August. Authorities must verify that exchanges and custodians can safely let tourists swap crypto for baht.

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  • Size up your hardware—deploying locally demands a powerful GPU and lots of RAM.

  • Build a knowledge base using retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) and embed documents into a vector database.

  • Choose and import a pre‑trained LLM that suits your needs.

  • Run the model, query it and evaluate results.

  • Tap communities like r/LocalLLaMA, and experiment with tools such as LM Studio for development and testing.

  • Understand bootstrapping and cross‑compilation to deploy across architectures.

Why It’s Worth Your Time: Self‑hosting gives you control over data privacy, avoids vendor lock‑in and can be cheaper at scale. This guide demystifies the setup process and points you toward helpful resources, making it a solid starting point for anyone serious about building bespoke AI systems.

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🏁 Tomorrow’s Forecast

Markets will hang on every word from Jackson Hole, AI researchers will watch the Turing Institute’s next move, and you’ll probably never look at cat videos the same way again. đŸŒ©ïž

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